Greg Mankiw's Blog

Saturday, September 14, 2019

Should grad students teach?

A student emails me a question:

Dear Prof. Mankiw,

I am in the first week of my PhD in
economics. I
follow your blog and I have read the advice you have posted for graduate
students.

I have heard competing hypotheses about whether PhD students
should teach during their studies. On one hand, teaching is a great experience
and a CV-builder for hopeful future academics. On the other hand, teaching is a
lot of work, and the opportunity cost of time for any PhD student is high.

Do you have any advice about how a PhD student (and a big
fan of your blog!) can reconcile these points?

Cheers,

[name withheld]

Teaching is not necessary while pursuing a PhD, but it is usually a good idea for several reasons.

Grad students can usually use the money, and teaching is often a good way to make some.

Teaching improves your oral presentation skills, which will be crucial when you go on the job market.

You will learn whether you enjoy teaching. If not, you might consider alternatives to an academic career.

When you apply for jobs, teaching experience will be a plus for many schools that might hire you.

Teaching will help remind you why you fell in love with economics in the first place. That can be useful during those inevitable days when your dissertation research is not going well.

Teaching will provide greater variety to your day than if you are solely focused on research. The personal interaction with students will often lift your spirits.

When you are teaching, you can be confident that you are making positive contributions to society, and that feeling is also good for your mental health.

Let me also mention one risk: If you enjoy teaching, you might use it as a distraction from getting your dissertation done. The key is moderation. Teach some, but not too much.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Writing Advice

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

News from Amazon

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Macro Policy Seminar

This fall, Ben Friedman and I are organizing the Macro Policy seminar in the Harvard economics department. (I am taking over this role from Marty Feldstein, who recently passed away.) Some local blog readers might enjoy attending.

The seminar will meet on Tuesday afternoons, from 1:30 to 2:45,
in Littauer M-15. Here is the schedule of speakers.

September
3
Kevin Warsh (former governor, Federal Reserve System)

September
10
Jim Stock (Harvard economics department)

September
17
Larry Ball (Johns Hopkins)

September
24
Arvind Subramanian (Kennedy School; former chief economic adviser, Government
of India)

October
1
Ioana Petrescu (former finance minister, Romania)

October
8
Steve Cecchetti (Brandeis; former chief economist, Bank of International
Settlements)

Friday, August 09, 2019

The Inflation-Unemployment Tradeoff

Monday, July 22, 2019

Competing with Shakespeare

What authors appear on the greatest number of syllabuses for college courses? The Open Syllabus Project collects the data that answer exactly this question. Here is the ranking. Shakespeare is number 1, and Plato is number 2. I show up at number 22, between Martin Luther King and Virginia Woolf.

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Demand Curves Slope Downward (even for socialists)

This is a wonderful story. Staffers in the Sanders campaign, who are working on salary, complain that they are paid less than the $15 per hour that Senator Sanders advocates for the minimum wage. So Sanders raises their hourly wage. Does that increase their income? No, because he raised the hourly wage by cutting the number of hours they work!

Of course, if a President Sanders raised the federal minimum wage, I am sure he would be confident that the change would not have any adverse employment effects. Downward-sloping demand curves may describe socialist political campaigns, but back in the actual capitalist economy, the laws of supply and demand work completely differently.

Monday, July 15, 2019

Review of Bernanke et al.

Friday, July 12, 2019

Freshman Seminar 2019

I have written in the past about the freshman seminar I run at Harvard. I am teaching it again this fall, and I thought my blog readers might be interested in my current reading list. I always mix it up a bit to keep it fresh and, to be frank, more fun for me. Here it is:

Sunday, June 30, 2019

Movie Recommendation

Monday, June 24, 2019

Not So Fast

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson argues "It’s time we tear up our economics textbooks and start over." He uses my book as a prime example. Perhaps not surprisingly, I disagree. My summary of Samuelson's article: Economics textbooks should be more like economics journalism, says an economics journalist.

Mr. Samuelson fails to fully appreciate the difference between journalism and textbook writing. Journalists are always looking for things that are new, for how the world has changed. That's why we call it the news. The editor of the science section of a newspaper would not be interested in a article explaining that Isaac Newton figured out the workings of gravity. Not newsworthy, the editor would say.

Textbook writers, on the other hand, emphasize those things that are true, important, and unknown to the typical reader (an 18 year old college freshman). Newness has little relevance. The lessons of Adam Smith do not apply only to the 18th century, the lessons of David Ricardo do not apply only to the 19th century, and the lessons of John Maynard Keynes do not apply only to the 20th century. They are timeless ideas that may not make good news stories but should be central to introductory economics. Just as Newtonian mechanics should remain central to introductory physics.

Yes, textbooks need to evolve as we learn more and as the world changes. New examples also show students how to apply the classic ideas to the issue of today. (The 9th edition of my principles text, available in about six months, includes a feature discussing social media like Facebook as a common resource.) But it would be a mistake for teachers of introductory economics to focus excessively on today's hot topics at the exclusion of timeless truths.

I had a 6th grade teacher who used to refer to newspapers as a "perishable commodity." That seems right, given their relentless focus on newness. Good textbooks, however, are more like durable goods. They do not go out of date nearly as quickly.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

The National Debt Is Still a Problem

Wednesday, June 05, 2019

Bowles and Carlin on Econ 101

Here is a paper by Sam Bowles and Wendy Carlin on teaching introductory economics. It is scheduled to be published in the JEL, along with my essay on textbook writing.

Reading their paper, I learned something about my own text. In footnote 17, they tell us the following:

Standard tools originally developed to compare the complexity of the language in training manuals in
the US Navy are used to compare the readability of the textbooks. The result of the Flesch test is that the
CORE text is somewhat more complex than Mankiw’s but less so than Krugman-Wells and Samuelson
1948. The tests are based on syllables per word / proportion of multisyllable words, and sentence length.
The use of multi-syllable words is virtually the same across the four texts, but Krugman-Wells and
Samuelson use longer sentences. The F-K measure’s output is the US grade level needed to comprehend
the text, according to which, Samuelson 48 and Krugman-Wells are comprehensible to a 12th grade
student, Mankiw to a 10th grader, and CORE to an 11th grader.

I was pleased to learn this, as I try to write in shorter sentences to make the text more readable. Learning economics is hard enough. So the style of writing should be as accessible as possible.

Addendum: For comparison, according to this source, academic papers are written at about the 12th grade level. Malcolm Gladwell writes at the 9th grade level, F. Scott Fitzgerald at the 8th grade level, Stephen King at the 6th grade level, and Ernest Hemingway at the 4th grade level. It also says that only about 1 in 8 U.S. adults can read at the 12th grade level.

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

The Next CBO Director

Sunday, May 12, 2019

The Fed should monitor wage trends

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari had a noteworthy op-ed this week, arguing that monetary policymakers should pay more attention to wage trends than they have in the past. Ricardo Reis and I reached a similar conclusion in a paper back in 2003.

About Me

I am the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. I use this blog to keep in touch with my current and former students. Teachers and students at other schools, as well as others interested in economic issues, are welcome to use this resource.